5 comments:

Nanny would never be able to resist any means of getting more information....She is like a "Pacman" that gobbles up information.... I suspect there will be even more opportunities for Nanny to put the information to good use in her fight against crime, terrorism etc etc and if she can criminalise a few people in the meantime and impose big fines or seize assets, she will be even happier...Remember once she arrests someone, she gets their DNA as well, whether they are found guilty or not.

It isn't information. Most if it is misinformation and sometimes deliberate disinformation and malicious tittle-tattle. That is what makes the keeping of secret files on people who haven't been charged with any offence so frightening. The police and security services build up bulky dossiers on you and me riddled with dubious assertions and prejudice. And they don't seem very effective in catching actual terrorists.

As I repeatedly ask - and never get an answer - who are these people whom the government employs to scrutinise our files and to snoop on us? What training do they have in weighing evidence, and who supervises THEM? Nanny never tells.

For some years I had an exceedingly nosy neighbour (ex South African) who prided himself on knowing everything about everyone's business and was constantly telling anyone who would listen his version of who was getting up to what with whom. I think he may have been an employee of BOSS back in RSA. Do we really want to live in that sort of society? I don't - but we already are. And it won't change under Cameron's Tories.

First thing, it's not the id cards per se, it's the odious database with it's 50+ classes (not just individual bits) of information that it's intending to capture and store in perpetuity - that is why I have long suspected that the Revenue would be sniffing the national identity register.

I have a healthy level of paranoia about the NIR as combined with some of the appallingly bad law that NuLab have pushed through, often by regulation rather than by proper Parliamentary debate, I think the balance between the individual and the state has lurched dangerously in favour of the state in the last decade.

Assuming my more paranoid views on the possible usage of the NIR are unfounded, you do have to ask yourself why is so much information required to determine someone's identity when much of it would not be accessible through the id card readers? The answer is of course that you don't. And you definitely don't go to the bother of collecting all that information just to store it.

I work with large databases all the time (nothing too unsavoury - tracking products through supply chains and reporting stock levels & sales) and what I spend most of my time doing is creating reports on all the data collected.

The more data there is to analyse, the more imaginative people get with ideas for reports. It often drives the expansion of the data collection as people realise that if they captured some additional piece of information, they can then combine it with the data they already have to highlight a particular trend.

The nature of large databases tells me that the temptation to go data mining in the NIR would be overwhelming. Given the state of the country's balance sheet, what better way for the Treasury to raise cash than to use all that information to spot spending patterns and other behaviours that aren't currently taxed and go and put some levy on them (probably with some spin about it reducing carbon emissions).

There were, and probably still are, some substantial earners in a cash only based economy most usually operated by some of the ethnic minorities. Much of the 'trade' seems to be internal to the special group and thus probably some distance from any details being known to HMRC, though they very likely have suspicions.

Since the same part of the population seems adept at sharing within their communities, even official 'documents' like driving licences and for all I know passports as well, I doubt that the small matter of an ID card when making a purchase WITHIN the regular system would trouble their anonymity.

Of course they are a mobile population who could easily uproot and take their business to another country if they felt so inclined. In fact the way the UK looks to be heading in the next generation or sooner many just might do that.

That said the computer revolution is tempting all governments to build databases to track anything that breathes. It would be ironic if a reliance on windmills for electricity made the entire scheme unworkably unreliable. Maybe that will be our salvation (of a sort ...)

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